The Burden of Liberty

Compromise in politics has gone completely out of style. There’s no longer any reason for a politician to do so, when all they need do is vote their party line and keep collecting a paycheck for voting “no.”

There’s always been a staunch line of perpetual political ass-sitters leeching off our government, but this new extremist hard-line is even worse. They think any form of across-the-aisle cooperation is akin to ideological treason, and are (somehow, amazingly) too damn stupid to understand that political government and legislative oversight IS ONLY an exercise in cooperation, and can only work in our checks-and-balances system IF THERE IS compromise. Congress is specifically intended to be a place where people come to compromise, so everyone gets the best deal possible for the largest amount of constituents on both sides; it always has been, from its original incarnation as the First Continental Congress to this day.

But… damn. This last six years has been an idiotic staring contest in both houses, resulting in almost zero forward movement, and both sides have lost.

It’s true that the United States has gone through this exact thing a few times before, utterly stagnant until something broke loose and work began again. But this latest batch of morons seems to have been sent up to the hill with the avowed intention of breaking the government ON PURPOSE. Because their constituents want them to “destroy” the government in order to “shrink” it. WTF?

Meanwhile a recent study has finally demonstrated that Fracking Chemicals have been detected in Pennsylvania drinking water. Because OF COURSE they have been. What kind of a sub-moron actually believes you can pump millions of gallons of chemically-infused water sideways into the ground, knifing through whatever existing aquifers happen to be in the way, and it will all magically “go away” into the mystical land of “down under there”?

But it’s all good. Hey, supporters of the fracking industry! Shut up, take your teensy monetary pay-offs (after the frackers predictably use illegal billing tricks to cut your payments down to nothing while they pocket obscene profits) and drink your poison.

The real solution, of course, is to have the geniuses in the House of Representatives simply take a vote that says fracking chemicals DON’T pollute the groundwater around well sites. Like their recent vote that affirmed climate change isn’t man-made, because the majority of the voters (GOP all) don’t want it to be. Just vote it away. That’ll fix things.

While we’re at it, we can also have them vote that Fracking doesn’t cause geological instability that leads to earthquakes, too. It’s like Harold and his Magic Crayon. Don’t like something? Vote that it doesn’t exist, and presto! It’s business as usual!

Meanwhile, the petrochemical companies continue to drill new fracking wells. Why wouldn’t they? Who’s to stop them? They promise money to the landowners and buy them off, they promise money to the townships and local government and buy them off, they promise money to the state and buy them off. Then they funnel it all into their own pockets and pay a pittance to the towns and peoples whose environment they ruin.

What about the screwed-up mining towns in the northern part of the state? The ones that were illegally undermined, stripped, and ruined in past decades? Have we learned nothing?

Of course we have. We have learned, yet again, that people will always be willing to mortgage their future and the future of their children for a few bucks in their pocket, now.